Midwest storm by the numbers

Although the massive Midwest storm has peaked in intensity and jogged into western Ontario, its effects are still being felt across a large chunk of the U.S. Winds are howling in upper Midwest and Great Lakes, wind-whipped snow is flying in the Dakotas, and the cold front ahead of the storm is producing showers and thunderstorms up and down the Eastern seaboard. A few severe thunderstorms could still develop this afternoon in the eastern mid-Atlantic (including the eastern portion of the D.C. metro region) and Southeast.

But today will be nothing like yesterday, when this monstrous storm made history. Let's take a look at some amazing numbers associated with this storm:

956 mb or 28.24" - Record low pressure from non-tropical storm in continental U.S.

... [the storm] had a minimum central pressure of 28.24" or 956 mb (equivalent to the minimum pressure of a Category 3 hurricane). This breaks the old record of 28.28" (958 mb), set on ...Jan. 26, 1978, during the Blizzard of 1978 (aka the Cleveland Superbomb). This is also lower than the March 1993 Superstrom (aka "The Storm of the Century"), or the "Witch of November" storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975, or even the Columbus Day Storm of Oct. 1962.

St. Paul Tribune meteorologist Paul Douglas wrote the pressure may have even dipped as low as 953 mb (28.14") in Orr - a town in Minnesota's arrowhead. The barometric pressure dropped to 28.99" in Chicago - the lowest reading on record during October.

North Dakota now has some "no travel advised" areas in the middle of the state (red markings) http://www.dot.nd.gov/travel-info/ Click on the box next to weather cameras then click on the route 14 camera to get a real taste of winter.

While the Midwest storm qualifies as a "bomb", it doesn't come close to some non-tropical oceanic cyclones in the eyes of "bombogenesis" aficionados (like myself).

One example is known as the "Queen Elizabeth-II" storm - for the major damage the liner suffered from a bomb in Septermber, 1978.

The storm intensified at the rate of 53 mb over a period of just 12 hours with the minimum low center pressure diving to 956 mb. The corresponding rate for the Midwest storm was "only" 16 mb/12 hours and took 24 hours to reach it's maximum intensity.

There are normally a number of extremely deep extratropical cyclones over the oceanic areas of the Southern Hemisphere...down there the vast expanses of relatively warm ocean and the very cold Antarctic air masses provide the temperature contrasts to fuel these monsters.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the Aleutian and Icelandic lows [or "gyres"] normally have the lowest pressures outside the tropics. Generally our variations in large-scale temperate circulation are due to displacements of position and intensity of these two systems which account for the shifts in the major teleconnections or oscillation patterns.